Steven J. Oatis. A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War,
1680-1730. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 399 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-08032-3575-5.
Reviewed by Michelle LeMaster (Department of History, Lehigh University)
Published on H-SC (October, 2007)
Revisiting the Southern Frontier
In recent years, a number of scholars have begun to
look at the much-neglected early years of English settlement in the Deep South. They have picked up where
Verner Crane left off with his pathbreaking The Southern Frontier: 1670-1732 in 1929, analyzing many issues
identified by Crane long ago but rarely addressed since.
Alan Gallay’s The Indian Slave Trade (2002), Steven C.
Hahn’s The Invention of the Creek Nation (2004), and Eric
Bowne’s The Westo Indians (2005) have begun to fill in
the large gaps in our knowledge of this critical and still
under-studied period. Steven J. Oatis’s A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee
War, 1680-1730 fits within this new flowering of scholarship on the region in the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. Oatis takes as his topic the socalled Yamasee War of 1715-1717, but this study is both
more and less than this. The subtitle most accurately expresses the scope and intent of the book. Rather than
focusing strictly on the Yamasee War, Oatis investigates
South Carolina’s Indian policy from the time the Yamasee
first moved to the region in the aftermath of the so-called
Westo War until their final defeat in Florida in 1728.
Instead, he redefines the frontier “to evoke the interaction of distinct cultures in a context of undefined power
relations,” emphasizing the processes of “exchange” and
“reactive change” (p. 6). He views the Deep South not as
a single “southern frontier” but as a “frontier complex,”
borrowing the term from Jack Forbes, who defined it as
“a multiplicity of frontiers in dynamic interaction” (p. 7).
Ultimately, though, the frontier concept that Oatis uses
still seems rather underdefined. Oatis has not engaged
with the concept of the borderlands (which might well
apply in a Southeastern context) nor with recent work
that has suggested other concepts that might also hold
explanatory power. This book does not really contribute,
therefore, to the debate about a useful concept to describe
North American intercultural interactions.[1]
Oatis adopts a predominantly narrative structure for
his account, tracing the development of South Carolina’s
Indian diplomacy chronologically over the time period
under consideration, although he also subdivides the eras
he discusses to take on larger thematic questions. Chapter 1 investigates the formation of the Yamasee-English
alliance, focusing on the ways in which the English both
In order to approach this topic, Oatis re-evaluates benefited from and supplanted those Indians’ earlier ties
Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis and appropri- with the Spanish at St. Augustine. Chapter 2 traces South
ates a modified concept of the frontier as the major or- Carolina’s actions during Queen Anne’s War, followganizing principle of his book. He acknowledges many ing the Carolina-led slave trades against Spanish mission
of the critiques of Turner’s thesis, noting that its tri- towns and efforts to spirit up allies against the French
umphal narrative failed to take into account “a patch- in Louisiana (which were less successful). Oatis argues
work of racial, class and ecological conflicts” (p. 5). Oatis convincingly that Queen Anne’s War and the expanding
is not ready, however, to jettison the concept entirely. trade increased the importance of Indian diplomacy for
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South Carolina, leading to the first efforts to regulate the
trade. Chapter 3 looks at South Carolina’s involvement in
the Tuscarora War and traces the failure of the province’s
efforts to regulate the Indian trade or discipline trader
abuses, which would have tragic consequences all too
soon.
in Florida.
Oatis investigates the relationship between South
Carolina and her Indian neighbors during an era that often receives short shrift, largely because of the scanty
source material. As an account of South Carolina policy,
it is an easy-to-follow narrative that can serve as a good
introduction to the time period, and it offers the most extensive account to date of the Yamasee War. Oatis pulls
together the many conflicts of the era into a cohesive
story that helps to make sense of the behavior of multiple players. It is unfair, perhaps, to critique an author
for the book he did not write. There are, however, many
questions left unanswered by Oatis’s treatment of the Yamasee War. It would be helpful to know more about the
Yamasee themselves. Who were they? How did their
proximity to the Spanish and the English alter their culture and society in the years before 1715? How did they
adapt to life near St. Augustine after the war, before
the final punitive raids destroyed their resistance? An
investigation of Spanish records (difficult for many researchers, including this reviewer, for language reasons)
might help to answer some of these questions. More
analysis of the relationships between the Spanish and the
French and the various Southeastern nations would also
be useful. These are questions for future researchers to
address. Oatis’s book is valuable for what it tells us about
the actions of South Carolinians during this crucial period of the region’s history.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 deal with the Yamasee War itself. Oatis argues persuasively that the Yamasee War was
not the result of a “general conspiracy” among Southeastern nations. While many tribes had grievances against
South Carolina, as well as cultural and even kinship ties
to one another (as the Yamasee and Ocheses did), there
was no unified plan to defeat the English. Rather, the
war involved several groups fighting for different reasons
in different places. The Yamasees faced extraordinary
debt, the threat of enslavement, the destruction of habitat
for the animals they hunted, and continued English encroachments on their land. They suffered the most at the
hands of the English and fought first, longest, and hardest for these reasons. Other groups had other concerns.
The Ocheses worried about the diminished opportunity
for military triumph and slave taking after the defeat of
the Spanish missions, and also worried about the cycle of
disease and debt that had overtaken the Yamasees. The
Cherokee and Catawba responded to trader abuses, but
their commitment to the war was not as strong as that of
the Yamasees and English promises of trade reforms (as
well as military setbacks) led both groups to make peace
quickly.
Note
For the English, the war caused a reorientation in
terms of how the colony saw its place in the empire.
South Carolina became less self-reliant, reaching out
both to other provinces and to the imperial government
for help. The war also brought about concerted efforts
to improve frontier defense and reform the Indian trade.
For the Indians, the outcome of the war is more complex.
In the short run, the war caused some groups like the Yamasees and the Ocheses to move further away from the
English and to establish closer relationships with England’s imperial rivals, the Spanish and the French. It also
contributed, however, to both consolidation and a growing factionalism within Indian societies that would complicate Indian foreign relations for decades to come.
[1]. For an alternative theory of frontiers and borderlands, see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From
Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the
Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 813-841; and the
responses in the following issue, including: Even Haefeli, “A Note on the Use of the North American Borderlands,” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999):
1222-1225; Christopher Ebert Schmidt-Nowara, “Borders
and Borderlands of Interpretation,” ibid: 1226-1228; John
R. Wunder and Pekka Hämäläinen, “Of Lethal Places and
Lethal Essays,” ibid: 1229-1234; and Jeremy Adelman and
Stephen Aron, “Of Lively Exchanges and Larger Perspectives,” ibid: 1235-1239. See also Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great
Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and the recent forum on the book (unavailable to Oatis at the time he wrote): Susan SleeperSmith, “Forum: The Middle Ground Revisited, Introduction,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2006): 3-
Chapter 7 investigates the Creek-Cherokee war that
grew out of the events of the Yamasee War and South
Carolina’s mostly unsuccessful efforts to control the situation. Chapter 8 looks at the continued expansion of
South Carolina into the former Yamasee territory and
what Oatis identifies as the final defeat of the Yamasee
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8; Richard White, “Creative Misunderstandings and New
Understandings,” ibid: 9-14; Philip J Deloria, “What is the
Middle Ground, Anyway? ” ibid: 15-22; Heidi Bohaker,
“Nindoodemag: The Significance of Algonquian Kinship
Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600-1701,”
ibid: 23-52; Brett Rushforth, “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and
the Limits of Alliance,” ibid: 53-80; and Catherine Desbarats, “Following The Middle Ground,” ibid: 81-96.
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Citation: Michelle LeMaster. Review of Oatis, Steven J., A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of
the Yamasee War, 1680-1730. H-SC, H-Net Reviews. October, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13687
Copyright © 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
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